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Financial services unprepared for disasters

The global financial system, and in particular its American players, coped well with the attack on the World Trade Centre on 11 September, but some companies may struggle to cope with similar events in the future.

Doubts remain about the robustness of the financial services sector in general and some individual companies in particular, to withstand any new outrages, a two day conference on contingency planning and disaster recovery revealed this week.

The London conference, organised by City and Financial Conferences, found many companies still overlooked the human and the external aspects of such disasters, confining their contingency planning to the replacement of in-house hardware.

Merrill Lynch provided lessons in crisis management based on its own experiences.

Others spoke of how business could be maintained through use of third party contracts and how losses could be insured against. General consensus among delegates was that contingency planning needed to be pushed much higher on the corporate agenda than it is now.